Design for Loving

by Doug Sanford

  Design for Loving

  By Doug Sanford

  Published by JMS Books LLC

  Visit jms-books.com for more information.

  Copyright 2019 Doug Sanford

  ISBN 9781634868419

  Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com

  Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.

  All rights reserved.

  WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.

  This book is for ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It may contain sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which might be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States of America.

  * * * *

  This is, chronologically, for Murray, Jim, and Chuck, the most important men in my life, each of whom has contributed, positively and in his very special way, to the development of my own design for loving.

  * * * *

  Design for Loving

  By Doug Sanford

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 1

  “Hey, Kevin. You feelin’ horny?”

  “What? Who is this?”

  “Kev, it’s me, Jerry. You wanna get off?”

  “I think you’ve got the wrong number. No Kevin here.”

  “Oh, shit. Sorry, man. My mistake. I musta dialed wrong.”

  Okay, that all sounds a bit stupid. But it was 1987—no internet, no caller ID. It was one of the ways you hooked up with guys in those days—well, how I hooked up with guys sometimes—and it pretty much worked, more often than not, for at least one session.

  Of course, there was no mistake. I always knew who I was calling. The “Kevin” and “Jerry” and the “musta dialed wrong” were part of the scam. Usually it was some hot-looking guy I’d seen somewhere in a store or bank or restaurant who wore a name badge with his last name on it so I could look him up in the phone book—yes, phone book. Again, it was 1987.

  But I always pretended I was calling someone else, usually the mythical Kevin, so the guy wouldn’t know I knew who he was and he could relax in the anonymity of it all—assured I really had dialed wrong and there was no chance I could call back—unless we both got off and he liked it and he gave me his phone number (which I already had of course) and asked me to call back. And some of them did.

  But this time I really had made a mistake—a big mistake—a life-altering mistake as it turned out.

  And if he hadn’t said what he said next, I probably would have hung up. Who knows how these things happen?

  “I guess you didn’t reach the party to whom you were speaking,” he said.

  “Huh? Where the hell did you get that?”

  “That’s Ernestine. It’s a classic.”

  “Yeah. Of course. But you sound much too young to know that.”

  “Recording. My dad has a lot of comedy records. I used to listen to them all the time. Lily Tomlin was one of my favorites.”

  “Good taste. How old are you anyway?”

  “Eighteen. Why? How old are you? “

  “Twenty-nine.”

  Why I did that—gave him my real age—I still don’t know. Usually, I went for twenty-two or twenty-three. I can pass for that on the phone. Turned out to be kind of important eventually, being honest with him.

  “I don’t know anybody that old. I have a cousin who’s twenty-five, but we don’t see each other much.”

  “Are you at the U of A?”

  “Yeah.”

  “First year?”

  “Yeah. So who were you looking for?”

  Usually this question, or some variation of it, came much earlier in the conversation, right after I said “I musta dialed wrong.”

  When it did, I would usually say something like, “This guy I met who said he was into getting off on the phone and gave me his number. Said his name was Kevin. But I must have copied it wrong or something. You’re not horny, are you?”

  If I was lucky, he’d say something like, “I’m always horny” or just “Yeah, I am” and off we’d go. If I wasn’t lucky and he said, “No” or something worse like, “Fuck off,” I’d just say, “Sorry I bothered you” and hang up.

  But not this time.

  “Are you Chris?” I asked.

  “No, but I thought you said you were looking for a Kevin.”

  “It’s kind of hard to explain.”

  “So?”

  “There’s this hot-looking guy named Chris who works at the post office I go to, but post office badges don’t show the clerk’s last name, so I never knew Chris-who until the other day when I was in line and I over-heard another clerk use Chris’ last name. I looked him up in the phone book, and this was the number I got.”

  “Maybe he used to have this number. I’ve only had it a few weeks. Were you looking to hook up? If you wanted Chris, why did you ask for Kevin?”

  “Maybe hook up. Phone sex at least. I never use the real name because I don’t want the guy I’m calling to know that I know who he is if he isn’t into it. So I pretend to be looking for a guy named Kevin. That way I don’t freak him out.”

  “How considerate,” he said, with a smile in his voice. God, that was cute.

  “So you’re gay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “No, but it’s cool. A good friend of my parents is gay, and he’s a nice guy.”

  “You fuck girls?”

  “Stop that. You really are looking for phone sex.”

  “Just curious.”

  And I was. Don’t know why I’d changed from being horny to being curious about this guy—maybe it was the Lily Tomlin thing. Not that I wouldn’t have gone right back into jack-off mode if he gave the slightest hint he was into that.

  “No. To be honest, I’m still a virgin.” He paused for a second or two. “I’m not sure I’ve ever said that to anyone before.”

 
“But you want to?”

  “Fuck girls? Not be a virgin? Yeah. I just haven’t found the right one yet. I don’t want to do it just to do it. I guess that sounds kind of weird.”

  “A little bit for a guy your age. Most eighteen-year-olds are so horny, they don’t care where they stick it. But good weird. Shows you’ve got character.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “Hey, don’t knock it. Says something about who you are. By the way, who are you? My name’s Marc—with a c—not Jerry. Jerry’s my phone sex name, but my real name is Marc.”

  “With a c,” he repeated. “I’m Bart.”

  “Big Bad Bart?”

  “Dunno about that. I am six feet tall, but not very bad. Maybe that’s my problem.”

  “I got you beat by five inches—in height at least. Not sure about elsewhere. And being bad’s my problem, I guess. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be looking for phone sex.” I laughed.

  “You do this a lot?”

  “More than I should probably. Some guys’ voices really turn me on.”

  Shit. This truth thing had to stop. I didn’t quite understand where I was going. I was in unfamiliar territory now that I’d gotten off my usual script.

  “What do you do on the phone if you don’t mind my asking?”

  I paused a couple of seconds. “You an English major?”

  “Just a freshman. Don’t have a major yet. Why?”

  “Most guys wouldn’t say, ‘if you don’t mind my asking.’ They’d say, ‘if you don’t mind me asking.’”

  “Mrs. Bloom was really hung up on using the possessive before a gerund. If we learned only one thing in senior English, we learned that. You know how teachers have these little things that really bug them? That was hers. If you got it wrong, she’d mark it with a big red circle. How come you noticed that?”

  My God—the possessive before a gerund. Most kids his age had no idea what a possessive was, much less a gerund. I think that was the moment I started paying much closer attention.

  “I used to be a Mrs. Bloom myself. I mean I taught high school English in Chicago before I moved to Tucson.”

  “So what do you do on the phone?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “I guess.” Pause. “Yeah, I do.”

  “I like to get a guy to talk about sex, things that turn him on or that he likes to do in bed. Try to get him excited. If the guy is straight, or pretends to be straight, I can talk about pussy too. Anything to get him hard, jacking, and shooting. I really love hearing a guy shoot his load.”

  “Wow.”

  “That’s probably more than you wanted to know about phone sex.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did it turn you on?”

  “There you go again. Not really,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you. I wish I could help.”

  “Want me to talk about girls?”

  “No. I don’t think just talking about it does it for me.”

  “You jack off a lot?” I asked.

  “What’s a lot?”

  “More than once a day?”

  “No. Not even. Maybe once a week.”

  “Not sure I could keep my hands off mine that long.”

  He laughed. Seemed like a good sign. At least he wasn’t freaked out.

  “Sorry, Bart. I’ll try to be good.”

  “That’s cool. It was my fault. I asked. You still teach?”

  “Not anymore. Left that when I left Chicago. Now I sell houses. Gives me more time to myself. Teaching was too much of a full-time-plus job: after-school activities, papers to read and grade, lesson plans. Besides, it was too dangerous.”

  “The kids were that bad?”

  “It was an inner-city school near the projects, but that wasn’t the danger I meant. The school was on the near-north-side. I lived right around there—not west toward the projects but east, toward the lake. You probably don’t know Chicago.”

  “Actually I kind of do. I was there a few times on visits. I’m from Champaign. My dad teaches at the U. of I. We took trips up there. I got to go to Second City a couple of times. That was great.”

  “I lived not far from Second City. But you probably noticed, if you weren’t too young, that it’s a gay area. The problem was that the kids from my school hung out there too—especially around the lake, and I kept running into students when I was out with my friends or looking for sex.”

  “Did you cruise a lot?”

  Another two-second pause. “If you’re straight, where did you pick up a word like cruise?”

  “I told you. My parents have a gay friend. Well, he’s a couple now.”

  “A couple of what?”

  “He’s with another guy in a relationship.”

  “And he talks about cruising?”

  “Not all the time.” He laughed. “He’d explain things I didn’t understand—or my mom and dad would.”

  “Did he try to seduce you?”

  “Of course not. He’s a friend of my parents. My dad teaches with him. He’d never do that. I’ve known him since I was a little kid. Is that all you think about?”

  “Sorry. I guess so sometimes.”

  “Anyhow, you were cruising in Chicago.”

  “It got to be too risky running into the kids. Being gay wasn’t really compatible with being a teacher—at least not according to the rules of the Board of Education of the City of Chicago. I was worried I’d be exposed or blackmailed. So I finally packed up and left.”

  “Why Tucson?”

  “Had a friend here—Dale—just a friend. He sent me an airline ticket to Tucson as a Christmas present in 1983. I fell in love with the place. It was amazing being able to swim outdoors on New Year’s Eve! I submitted my resignation in May and moved here in July. Nobody bothered to tell me that it was the worst possible time—middle of the summer. Still, I survived.”

  That was mostly a true story. That is, everything I said was true, but I’d left out the part about having just gotten out of a three-year relationship with a guy who started having serious sadomasochistic sex urges and wanted me to do things to him that I was in no way able to do.

  “What brought you to Tucson?” I asked. “If you’re from Champaign, why not the University of Illinois?”

  “I wanted to get away from home. Besides, my dad teaches there. I didn’t want to be known as Dr. Rastin’s son and have people think that’s how I got in. I had enough of that crap in high school. My parents understood. They’re cool, my parents. They thought it would be better for me to have some independence and live on my own. I had a scholarship, and I could use it anywhere I wanted. My dad’s got a brother who lives in Scottsdale, and I thought Arizona sounded different. But I didn’t want ASU because it would be too close to my aunt and uncle, so I went for the U of A.”

  “You like it?”

  “I’ve only been here about a month, and classes just started. It’s too soon to tell. Sure is hot.”

  “You’ll get used to it. I did. It’s hard on everyone at first.”

  Damn. What the hell was I doing discussing the weather? That was definitely not what I had planned when I made the call.

  But I couldn’t stop myself. I really was getting interested in Big Bad Bart and wanted to keep him talking.

  And I did. It wasn’t difficult. It went on for another hour. No shit. I spent about an hour and a half talking to this kid who wasn’t even going to give me a chance to get off.

  What did we talk about other than the weather? My feelings about Tucson (positive), his high school career (he liked school, was in honors classes in his junior and senior years and graduated second in his class of 162—I had to force that out of him), what he wanted to major in (he wasn’t sure, but economics, poli-sci, and English were at the top of his current list).

  I learned that he lived by himself in a small studio apartment. It turned out that he had not one scholarship, but three, one of which took care of his high out-of-state tuition. Th
e other two provided money for books and living expenses.

  His father taught political science at the University of Illinois and his mother taught elementary school in Urbana. Since they didn’t have to pay his tuition, they were able to send him an allowance for fun stuff.

  He was an only child, an odd kid who seemed to have had a somewhat lonely childhood with few, if any, close friends—high school and neighborhood acquaintances, but not anyone he was really tight with. I found that out because I asked him if he’d ever jacked off with other guys.

  I know: I’m shameless.

  He hadn’t.

  Nice voice and curious about everything, but I figured him for a bit of a nerd, smart but not socially adept or good looking. One of those kids, maybe, with pimples who try to grow beards when they don’t have enough hair. Those were probably the reasons for “not finding the right girl.” Wasn’t very popular from what I could tell.

  “Hey, Marc, it’s eleven o’clock, and I still have part of a chapter of Western Civ to read for tomorrow. I’ve got to get off.”

  I laughed. “Tease. I already gave you your chance.”

  Surprisingly enough, he laughed too. “No, really. I’ve got to go. It’s been—I don’t know—different talking to you.”

  “Can’t believe what time it is. Longest obscene phone call I’ve ever made without a payoff. No, seriously, Bart, you’re an interesting guy. I know this sounds strange, but would you mind if I called you back some time?”

  “No, that might be fun. Do you have the right number?”

  “I called you, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, but you said you must have misdialed. Or was that part of your thing? I think I’m still confused about that. Anyhow, yeah, call me back some time.”

  “Night, Big Bad Bart.”

  “Night, Marc with a c.”

  I hung up the phone, undressed, and went to bed. I remember kind of mentally shrugging my shoulders about the call, thinking What was that all about? and then falling asleep very quickly.

  Chapter 2

  “Hey, Bart.”

  “Marc?”

  Good sign—he recognized my voice. Either that or he didn’t get many phone calls.

  “Yeah. Is this a bad time? Is it too late?”

  It really was too late. It was about 10:30 P.M. two nights later, and I’d had a hell of a time waiting as long as I did. I may not have thought about him when I got off the phone, but I couldn’t think about much of anything else but him for the next two days.